Who Left the Firewood at My Door
In the morning the note was gone. The rock sat where I left it. The stack was fresh.
A week later I set out a thermos of hot coffee on the rail, the old red-lidded Stanley that was Ray’s, with two sugars, the way he took it. I told myself that was a silly thing to do. The next morning it was empty. Rinsed clean. Set upright on the rail with the lid screwed back on.
Rinsed. Somebody had taken the trouble to rinse it.
Twice I tried to catch them. I set the alarm for three, put on my coat, and sat in the dark kitchen with my face near the window. The first night I fell asleep sitting up like an old farm dog. The second night I made it past four. When I woke the sky was gray, I had a crick in my neck, and there was a fresh stack against the wall.
Jasper didn’t like any of it. When I finally told him, on the first Sunday in December, there was a silence on the line so long I thought we had lost the connection.
“Mom, somebody is coming onto your property in the dark.”
“Somebody is leaving me firewood, Jasper.”
“That’s how it starts. Let me put a camera on the porch. They’re nothing, sixty bucks, I’ll order it tonight.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I thought about that. It was a fair question, and sensible people everywhere would say I was being foolish. Maybe I was.
“Because if somebody is being kind in the dark,” I said, “it isn’t mine to take away from them. I’d only be catching them. They aren’t a thief.”
But here is the part I didn’t say. I was afraid that if I caught them, they would stop. My husband was dead, my son was a long day’s drive away, and my God and I weren’t on speaking terms. And here was a pile of firewood showing up every cold morning like a promise somebody else was keeping for me.
By then I had started talking to it. I’d stand at the back door in my robe with my coffee and look out at the bean stubble going gray with morning, and say it out loud.
“Morning. Thank you.”
Then one morning, in the stove-light, I added: “Lord, you know whose hands these are. Keep them warm, too.”
I didn’t mean to pray. It came out of my mouth like a cough. I stood very still afterward as if I might have broken something.
Nothing happened. No bolt, no voice. But the next morning I said it again, and it got to be a little prayer before breakfast, and then a few sentences. By Christmas I was talking to God in the old plain way, like a hired man you have worked beside for years and are tired of being mad at. I told Him I was still angry. I think He had heard worse from better people.
The twenty-eighth of December, the temperature fell to twenty-two below zero.
I woke at five, half frozen under three quilts, the wind talking in the walls. I had banked the stove the night before and it had burned itself out. The front room was cold as a cellar. I went to the back door in despair.